Re: BT, Section 45

On Fri, 14 Jul 1995, David Blacker wrote:

> Could I quote Borges to conclude? From "The Immortal" story: "Death (or
> its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of
> their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is
> not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream.
> Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the
> perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every
> thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible
> beginning, or the other faithful presage of others that in the future will
> repeat it to a vertiginous degree. There is nothing that is not as if lost
> in a maze of indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can happen only once, nothing
> is preciously precarious. The elegaical, the serious, the ceremonial, do
> not hold for the Immortals. Homer and I separated at the gates of Tangier;
> I think we did not even say goodbye." (from LABYRINTHS)
>
> Thanks for listening. Is this suggestive at all? David

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Hmmm... yeah it is. I'm remembering that passage where Heidegger says
that in anticipatory resoluteness, in authentic being-towards-death, there
is an unshakeable joy and a sober understanding of one's basic factical
possibilities qua Dasein, not some depressive funk or pseudo-intellectual
retreat from existence [BT 358/SZ 310]. And surely it is in anticpatory
resoluteness that Dasein's awareness of its own finitude is most acute,
no? So do you think perhaps what he was driving at was what you just
wrote about? Seems very plausible to me...

Cool stuff!


Sincerely,

-David Schenk.


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